Anthony Cody taught for many years in the Oakland public schools. We co-founded the Network for Public Education in 2012. His blog is called “Living in Dialogue.”
He writes:
Who is Allowed to be Selfish?
Isn’t it a bit strange – our capitalist economy is built on the glorious profit motive. The wealthy are expected to be selfish – they are rewarded for their ability to make more and more, and expected to avoid taxes, military service, and anything else that is unpleasant or risky. But only some people are allowed to be selfish.
Trump can insist that anyone who meets with him be tested. But he demands schools reopen, which means teachers will meet in closed rooms with as many as 160 students a day. Teachers must not put their own health above the needs of their students and the economy that requires they be in school six or seven hours a day.
It is unfortunate that we do not have funds to pay for nurses, counselors or librarians in our schools. But most wealthy people don’t send their children to public schools anyway. They get to make a different choice. But some of us have fewer choices. It pretty much falls along economic lines. Meat workers are essential workers — they have been required to show up and make sure we all have hamburgers. Waiters, restaurant workers, likewise, they can mask up and get back to work. Teachers find themselves in this same boat; they have no permission to worry about their health or that of their families.
So Disney will have their workers open their parks again. School boards and legislators meeting on Zoom will decide to send teachers back to reopen their schools when social distancing is impossible.
If you are a worker, your reluctance to work, your desire to protect your family and community from illness or death is SELFISH. And you, as a worker, must be selfless and willing to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the economy. And don’t even mention that if you are Black, Indigenous or Latino, your chances for getting the virus is greater, and your outcomes likely to be worse.
And the billionaires get tax breaks and government bailouts, and their stock holdings gain value, and that is “the economy getting back on track.” Because the wealthy have the ultimate privilege – the right to be selfish. And working people get a sort of upside down socialism, where they are required to serve the common interests of society, and not allowed to protect even their own health.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Governor Holcomb had some good ideas, but he was weak and caved in to the far R. Here is my letter sent August 5, 2020 to Governor Holcomb.
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I was cheering when you said that all Hoosiers 8 years old and older had to wear a mask. You bravely, and correctly, said that anyone who DIDN’T wear a mask would face having a demeanor charge against them. This was absolutely necessary so that EVERYONE in this state would be protected as much as possible from receiving the COVID-19 virus.
Then you chickened out under pressure and decided to make the misdemeanor go away. Now, those who don’t wear a mask are supposed to magically be ‘educated’. This is a farce.
You backpedaled even further, to declare that children who go to school, don’t have to wear a mask if they are either 3 feet or 6 feet away from each other. Do you realize that some schools don’t have windows that will open? Some rooms in schools only have doors and NO windows! Exactly how is a school room going to be ‘safe’ when there is no adequate ventilation?
I SUPPORT THE POSSIBILITY OF ALL TEACHERS IN INDIANA STRIKING. THEY DON’T WANT TO DIE BECAUSE OF YOUR INABILITY TO DO WHAT IS RIGHT FOR THIS STATE!! I am a retired public school teacher.
State leaders in the American Federation of Teachers are encouraging Indiana and local school leaders to make decisions based on community testing and tracing capacities, available safeguards for teachers and students and adequate school funding — OTHERWISE, TEACHERS MIGHT WALK OUT!!
AFT-Indiana represents 4,500 members across the state in 27 local unions consisting of teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff.
“Teachers, parents, students and administrators want and need to go back to school,” AFT-Indiana President GlenEva Dunham said in a Tuesday morning news conference. “But, going back to school must be done safely. The members of AFT-Indiana will not be threatened or bullied into returning into situations that are not safe,” Dunham said. “Our lives, as well as our children’s lives, are at stake because we do know, make no mistake, that COVID-19 kills.”
SCHOOLS SHOULD NOT OPEN AT THIS TIME. No public school has the money to provide safety for everyone in the school. Even if every child has his/ her temperature taken daily, that isn’t enough to prevent COVID-19 away from students and any adult inside the school.
No public school has the money for safe distancing, washing regularly of hands, decent circulation of filtered air, sanitizing all of the equipment all of the time and masks for children who will be taking them off regularly throughout the day. No school has the room for 10 or even 15 in a classroom. No bus has the room for 6 feet apart. No substitute teacher will come into a school when anyone has been tested positive.
Businesses are struggling to provide a decent environment for their workers….well SOME do care. Too many don’t. Schools have people who care about children but they don’t have the necessary money to build more classrooms and hire more teachers, even if they were to be available..AND THEY AREN’T AVAILABLE.
Many substitute teachers are retired and they don’t want to come into a school under these conditions.
Horrible things will happen once schools open up permanently well before it is time. It will start another rise in deaths and confirmed cases.Public schools don’t have the necessary equipment to keep all adults and all children safe during this time of extreme crisis DUE TO A LACK OF LEADERSHIP FROM THE TOP. That includes you Mr. Holcomb, Congressional members of the GOP, AND President Trump.
Nobody should have their child miss school but it is worse if they die.
Yes, Trackback, this is what teachers should do en masse. The ‘framing’ must be that opening schools is dangerous for both the children and their parents.
Teachers are like others who choose a career of public service as opposed to one of ‘making money’. The good ones, at least, value the welfare of their students over their own. The ‘money makers’ can’t understand that ethic, but many parents can.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s a fantasy’
Jeff Gregorich, superintendent, on trying to reopen his schools safely
https://networkforpubliceducation.org/brokenpromises/?link_id=0&can_id=fd6da84ac13ff13d5a9e46f66364e68e&source=email-breaking-npe-new-report-documents-15-year-charter-closure-rate-of-50&email_referrer=email_882540&email_subject=just-released-npe-report-documents-that-half-of-all-charters-close-by-year-15
This is sobering but so true and why we need the protections of unions. Workers unite!
1968, Martin Luther King, preparing for his campaign on behalf of poor people:
“This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”
This is the principle that Republicans live by.
when ‘rugged individualism’ stands in for ‘disposable’
“Rugged individual ” : the rug that the rich walk on.
Great quote.
True in 1968….could it be even MORE valid today?
Public schools are an economic engine, not just because they pay the workers, but because they allow millions of workers to go to work knowing that their children are safe and busy at school. With the rise of so many billionaires and millionaires, they have used their wealth to capture policy. As a result we have one of the widest income gaps in the industrialized world. Our union membership is a little over 10% while poverty in public schools continues to increase. The oligarchs do not care about the rest of us or our children. They have no need for public schools so they want to privatize so they can provide even more income for the already wealthy. Robert Reich has said the real divide is not between conservatives and liberals, it is really about the 1% against everyone else. Working people in this country need unite to fight for the common good. Unless we get the money out of politics, we may not have a middle class to save.
Great piece, Anthony.
Isn’t it interesting how all the social and political controversies that have roiled the country over the past few decades (including several education crises we have both experienced and spoken out about) boil down to moral questions and principles?
I am reading Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘How the South Won the Civil War’ right now, and she says what’s happening today–that third of the country supporting Trump and insisting that old, rich, white men have the God-given right to rule the country–started when the principle of ‘all men were created equal’ was adopted.
About a third of the country (the old, rich, white men exploiting slavery in the south) never believed that all men were equal. They believed only property-holding white men were entitled–by ‘nature’–to manage natural resources and people. After they lost the Civil War, it took them only a decade or so to continue on with this belief, spreading it westward. And it’s never gone away.
It’s another of defining selfishness.
Anthony has put his finger on the underlying cause of so much of our American dysfunction. Teachers need to ‘rise up’ and demand justice, however they also need to meld with a larger movement that restores the democratic republic (representative lawmaking directed from the bottom up). Most teachers are well suited to this task thanks to the nurturing aspect of their profession (I’m talking k-12 here.. historically, many who ‘taught’ in colleges were more interested in pontificating and pursuing their research career, yet some also enjoyed teaching and wanted to serve the next generation).
I want to add this to what Mr. Cody said: “Corporate America seeks legal protection for when the coronavirus lockdowns lift.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-liability/corporate-america-seeks-legal-protection-for-when-coronavirus-lockdowns-lift-idUSKCN223179
What does that mean?
Well, this is what I’m thinking: Because it cuts into profits, corporate America doesn’t want to pay for the safeguards that would protect their employees from the virus and because many of those employees will become infected and some will die, corporate America wants to be safe from being sued by the dead employees’ families.
That way Corporate America will be free to threaten their employees and force them to come back to work or quit. If they quit, corporate America may not have to pay unemployment benefits. The employee that quits his/her job has to fight the corporation to possibly qualify for unemployment.
The employee that quits has to prove they had a good reason to quit.
“If an employee claims he or she was forced to quit, however, the employer might have more incentive to contest the claim. The employee won’t be eligible for benefits if the employer convinces the hearing officer that he or she quit voluntarily. And, no employer wants to admit that an employee was constructively discharged (forced to quit because of dangerous working conditions or sexual harassment, for example). Many employers will choose to fight this type of claim, hoping that they can win and avoid setting the employee up for a wrongful termination lawsuit.”
https://www.employmentlawfirms.com/resources/employment/unemployment/how-to-get-unemployment-after-quitting-job
Yup!
The philosophy of shellfishness was expounded by the eccentric Ayn Rand and has been accepted by a generation of people who have accumulated the money in their generation. The odd thing is that the Ayn generation actually needed a philosophy. Why not just take to the highway and rob and steal. Why not piracy? I read that Vane and Blackbeard were not so bad.
The fake ‘Chosen One’ speaks out against the beliefs of Biden.
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WaPo:
This week, President Trump painted a very different picture of Biden, mocking his presumptive Democratic opponent as a man hostile to religion. “Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything,” Trump said of Biden on Thursday. “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.”
TrumpEekThinlySkin pops out more lies. Lying that Biden is against God will be a hard lie to sell to even many of his followers who do not seem to care if Trump is religious or not as long as he is a racist and white supremacist. Tthe older, uneducated, rural white men that make up the majority of Trump’s supporters DO NOT CARE. If Trump attended the Chuch of Satan and slept on a bed made of money and women’s body parts, those deplorable always Trump supporters WOULD NOT CARE.
Biden and his wife are Roman Catholics and regularly attend Mass at St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine in Greenville, Delaware.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/18/politics/biden-faith-evangelicals/index.html
Trump doesn’t know which end of a Bible is up, and “Most Americans don’t see Trump as religious; fewer than half say they think he’s Christian”
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/most-americans-dont-see-trump-as-religious/
“But despite President Trump’s claims to mainline Protestantism, investigations by CNN have found that while he did attend church in his youth, there is no evidence that he, as an adult, is attached to any Christian tradition at all.”
https://www.beliefnet.com/news/politics/the-strange-faith-of-donald-trump.aspx
“A Former Pastor of Trump’s Church Says He Never Saw Him There”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/former-marble-collegiate-pastor-says-he-never-saw-trump-at-church_n_5c51f51ee4b04f8645c728a8
Political explains the real reason for Trump’s latest lie laced attack on Biden.
“Trump allies see a mounting threat: Biden’s rising evangelical support”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/21/trump-allies-see-threat-biden-evangelical-support-330780
Lloyd,
Your metaphors are priceless!
Thank you.